PNG’s Peter O’Neill wants answers on detention centre

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister
Peter O’Neill
accused Australia of an “abuse of trust" because local ­businesses are not benefiting ­financially from an asylum seeker detention centre on Manus Island.

Mr O’Neill was quoted by PNG’s national newspapers as expressing concern local business owners were getting a raw deal under its processing agreement with Australia.

“It is alarming to note that our Papua New Guinea businessmen and women are not given the opportunity to ­participate and that was the whole intention of setting up this centre in the first place,’’ he told the PNG Parliament.

“The agreements are very clear and it is a blatant abuse of trust.

“The sooner the operators of the centre realise they have to become part of the community, the easier it is going to become," he said.

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Mr O’Neill said he would write to Foreign Minister
Julie Bishop
and the Australian High Commission after Manus Island MP
Ron Knight
raised concerns on Friday.

Australia is housing up to 1200 male asylum seekers on the remote island in northern PNG .

The ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday night revealed people smugglers were offering asylum seekers passports and Australian visas for entry to fly to Australia by plane rather than by boat.

The investigation revealed the documents were being sold for up to $16,000.

Four Corners secretly filmed an Iraqi national known as Abu Tarek offering the documents to potential customers in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.

The scam involved passports issued by Bahrain or Oman and teaming them with Australian holiday visas or transit flights to New Zealand.

Once they landed in Australia the document ­holders applied for asylum.

Separately, the Parliamentary Budget Office’s
Phil Bowen
was forced to defend his office’s use of Coalition assumptions about the number of boat people expected to arrive in Australia when it calculated the impact of its ­border protection policies.

Former finance minister
Penny Wong
asked Mr Bowen if his office had tested the Coalition’s assumptions and why it had not used alternative modelling by the Finance Department on ­illegal immigration numbers.

The Budget Office concluded the Coalition’s plans to reduce the number of asylum seekers would generate $1.2 billion in budget savings over the four years until 2016-17.

Mr Bowen confirmed to a Senate committee on Monday the figure was based on a Coalition assumption that the number of arrivals each month would fall from 1098 people this financial year to 55 in 2016-17.

Under questioning from Senator Wong, Mr Bowen said: “We have adopted the figure the Coalition assume, but we also had regard to the fact that the Coalition’s policy ­specification that impinge on arrival rates, differs to . . . the ones that ­previously existed.

“It is true they provided that, but if you read the whole costing, we also had regard to a whole range of policy ­specification," he said.

Immigration Minister
Scott ­Morrison
defended the Abbott government’s decision to give two former customs patrol boats to Sri Lanka and declined to say if conditions had been imposed on their use.

“We will work through those arrangements with the Sri Lankan ­government," he said.

“That is the appropriate place to have those discussions."

Mr Morrison added that the former Labor government had considered ­giving the boats to Sri Lanka to stem the tide of asylum seekers.

Opposition immigration spokesman
Richard Marles
said there needed to be clearer guidelines on how Sri Lanka could use the boats.

“I think the Australian people would want to know what they are going to be used for from the point of view of the national interest and given the recent history of Sri Lanka,’’ he said.